


Configured Stars

by ValleyofFear



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fairy Tales, Gen, Minor Amy Pond/Rory Williams, Some sciencey stuff, Telepathy, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 19:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1700039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ValleyofFear/pseuds/ValleyofFear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Doctor loved picnics, with the blankets and the rolling around in the grass and the strange little desserts. Yes, he decided, until the aliens showed up, a picnic had been a great idea." </p>
<p>Eleven, Amy, Rory, and the Ponds' neighbors are kidnapped and taken to a planet where an impossible civilization is slowly being wiped out by mysterious enemies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Configured Stars

О perpetual revolution of configured stars,   
О perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,   
О world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!   
The endless cycle of idea and action,   
Endless invention, endless experiment  
– T.S. Eliot, The Rock

 

Since the day they had come to live in the house with the TARDIS-blue door, Amy and Rory had spent more time hopping around with the Doctor than they had in their own time stream. Along with aging them at twice the rate of everyone else, this had harmful effects on their relationship with the neighbors. It’s awkwardly difficult to remember names and previous topics of conversation when you’ve been whisked away for weeks of adventures in the space of a four-minute break from a party. And Amy couldn’t count the times when aliens had scheduled an invasion on the day of an intended neighborhood get-together. The Doctor would always need the Ponds’ help, so they’d be running and sonicking and fishing rapidly mutating cabbages out of someone’s koi pond while the neighbors sipped tea and chatted without them.

When her alarm clock went off on the day she was meant to have everyone over for a Sunday lunch, Amy opened her eyes with a cautious wince. She didn’t relax when she saw that no Time Lord had been watching, waiting for her to awaken. Nor did she relax when she stepped out onto the street and cast her sight over a sky free of Daleks or flying ships. She only began to believe that everything would be alright, that today would be normal and everyone would be safe, when the doorbell rang announcing the arrival of the first guests. Rory slipped off his apron and Amy hurried over to let the two middle-aged sisters into the house.

An hour later, everything was still going just fine. The adults were chatting in a few groups, and if Darren said something a bit too harsh or borderline offensive, it was alright because the two sisters, Janet and Linda, kept the conversation flowing smoothly. Everything was perfectly normal, but all the same, Amy kept her ears open for the groaning of the TARDIS.

The only time when the noise level rose high enough to have conceivably concealed the familiar strains of the time-and-space ship was when victorious and angry cries broke out from the room where the three neighborhood children were playing. The adults hurried over into the lounge to see David crying as Stella, the youngest, struggled to pull a stuffed toy sheep from the hands of a resisting Jordan.

“Jordan, stop it!” Darren barked at his son, and the older boy dropped the toy with a jerk.

“It’s mine, and I was playing with it, and he stole it from me,” David cried.

“That’s right,” Stella confirmed as she picked the sheep up and dragged it back to her brother.

Darren opened his mouth to reprimand Jordan again, but Rory spoke first. “Jordan, let David keep the sheep. It’s his favorite toy, and he’s very attached to it. But maybe if you’re nice, he’ll let you see it later.” Jordan crossed his arms and sulked, but he nodded. Disaster averted, the adults walked back towards the kitchen.

“As I was saying, Janet’s thinking about looking for a new job,” Linda continued to Amy, picking up the conversation that the recent confrontation had forced them to drop. “It’s been several years since the accident, and she’s finally started to get past it.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Amy said, but just as they started to step into the kitchen, she stopped, her heart beating double-time.

An apparition pressed itself to the glass door to the back. Its hair swooped over its face in a smooth surge like the tidal wave it was about to break over her pleasant afternoon. Its clothing was slightly crumpled and disordered, as if the creature had been blown to her house on a cold wind, but the bowtie in the center was mockingly orderly, blood red. The apparition waved its hands, stuck out its tongue, and struck a dramatic pose. The Doctor.

“I’m really happy that she wants to go back to chemistry research,” Linda was still saying, though Amy wasn’t listening. “She and her team could make some discoveries, help other people as she helps herself move on with her life. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“God, no,” Amy said distractedly, hoping that whatever breeze or fancy had brought the Doctor here would take him away again.

“What?” Linda asked in confusion.

“Sorry, Linda. I wasn’t talking about Janet. It’s just that an old friend seems to have chosen this moment to show up.” She gestured at the backdoor.

“Oh, you must let him in,” Linda said, moving towards the door.

“No,” Amy said, and she reached out an arm to snatch Linda back, but the other woman was already out of reach. The Doctor gave a final tap on the glass and a wave before the door slid open.

“Nice to meet you,” the Time Lord said, kissing her on both cheeks. “I’m John Smith, a friend of the Ponds. I just popped over for a chat. Thought we could bake some jammy dodgers. I brought the dough.” He opened a tan bag that had been clutched in his hand and smelled its contents. “Almost ready. What do you say, Pond?” He grinned, but then wilted slightly at her stormy expression.

“Er, Linda, could you go talk with the others for a few minutes? I want to speak with… John.”

“Sure, sure. You two have fun catching up,” Linda said with a goodbye wave to the Doctor. As the woman moved back towards the kitchen, Amy heard a distant voice from the other room ask, “Where’d that big blue thing come from?” An instant later, Rory was trotting towards her and the unexpected guest.

“Doctor!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

He waved the bag of dough around. “I thought we could make some jammy dodgers. I’ve only ever bought them at the store or had the TARDIS synthesize them, so I thought it’d be fun?” Uncertainty changed the last sentence into a question as Amy continued to glare at him.

“I was trying to have a party. A nice, proper party without any aliens at all. And this is the first time I’ve gotten up the courage to face all of the neighbors after Linda saw the Ood you sent us and started screaming.”

The Doctor frowned. “Oh. Sorry about that, Pond. But you’ve got to admit, he does make good sausages.”

She smiled reluctantly. “Alright, I’ll forgive you for that. But Rory and I are not going on any adventures today. No helping the queen with a little problem, no accidentally attracting scientific teams from Saturn, no quick trips to a very safe planet that actually might be in the middle of a civil war. You can either leave and come back later, or you can stay and act like a normal human adult.”

“Course I’ll stay. I can never pass up a party at the Ponds’ house. So, you have an oven, don’t you? And some jam?”

“You are so hopeless, Doctor. We’re the Williams family, and making jammy dodgers is so not a normal adult thing to do at a neighborhood gathering.” She gave him a gentle shove towards the kitchen. “Alright, come and meet everyone. There’s only six of them. With all your cleverness, surely you can convince half a dozen humans that you’re an ordinary person.”

When they squeezed into the crowded kitchen, Janet was saying, “No matter why they keep coming here, at some point they might come to stay. It’ll be interesting to see how everyone reacts.”

Amy and the Doctor joined the rough circle that had formed around the table holding snacks and hors d’oeuvres. “Hi, John, is it? I’m Frank” said the forty-year old man. (“Single father of two kids, Stella and David,” Amy whispered to the Doctor.) “We were just talking about aliens and about that weird business at the Olympics.” Amy nudged Rory with her elbow, and he shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t picked the conversation topic.

“No one would allow it, you know. They wouldn’t let them stay here.” Julia said. “Aliens could have diseases, or, I don’t know, be radioactive or violent. I wouldn’t feel safe raising Jordan with aliens around.” Darren held his wife’s hand in support. The Doctor coughed nervously and adjusted his bowtie.

“Just kill them all, straight away, I say. Get rid of them before they have a chance to mess anything up. From what we’ve seen so far, it’s pretty likely that they’d end up trying to kill or enslave or disappear everyone,” said Darren.

Amy, Rory, and the Doctor all tried to speak at once, but Carol’s voice cut over theirs. “That’s idiotic. Just because it’s possible that they’ll be hostile doesn’t mean that we should kill all aliens before they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. Poor people are statistically more likely to commit crimes, so should we kill everyone below a certain wage level? You’re ridiculous.”

“Thank you for that,” the Doctor said, watching Darren warily.

“That was Carol,” Amy explained quietly to the resident alien. “She gets angry easily. Lives alone, doesn’t have a lot of people over. No one knows a lot about her, other than that she’s an electrician.”

“You know, speaking of aliens, Jordan was telling me earlier about an interesting project he was working on at school. Something about why a lot of aliens look vaguely like humans.” Linda said, nudging the conversation toward less volatile topics. “How’s Jordan been doing recently? No more trouble with behavior, I hope?”

Julia started to reply, but her quiet voice was drowned out by three arguing children. Darren sighed. “I’ll go see what he’s done now,” he said.

“I’ll help him,” said Janet, and the two moved off towards the cacophony. The Doctor used the break in the conversation to grab a handful of crisps from the table in front of him.

Julia looked down at the ground, as if deciding rather to answer blandly or to tell the truth. “Actually, Linda, Jordan’s been having some trouble. He behaves badly at school, and the teachers have called home several times. He’s just so restless and hyper, except sometimes he has no energy at all. I talked to his teacher, and she told me to take him to a psychiatrist to see if he has ADHD or something and to get him some medicine for it, but Darren doesn’t want us to. He just keeps saying that Jordan will get through it on his own.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?” Frank asked.

“No, Darren would just get defensive.” Julia looked up from where she had been fidgeting with the material of her dress. “I’m sorry for telling you all this, especially you, John. You just popped over for a party, and now I’m burdening you with all my problems.”

“It’s no problem, Julia,” the Doctor said. “Because I’ve met a lot of people like Darren and a lot of people like Jordan, and I know how these things turn out. Don’t give up on Darren yet. If you keep telling him in the right ways, he’ll realize the truth. But Jordan is gonna be brilliant. Yeah, he might be having a hard time now, but even if he’s restless and hard to control his whole life, he can find a way to make use of it. I was just like him in school, always running off and never sitting still. But you can ask Amy and Rory, and I think I’ve done a few things in my life, hyper and excitable or not. Jordan will be wonderful. He’ll travel places and meet people and find cool things to do with his energy and his lethargy. In the end, he’ll be truly brilliant.”

Julia looked up at the Doctor with tear-filled eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure,” said the Doctor.

Jordan’s mother blew her nose, and Carol looked uncomfortable.

Amy cleared her throat. “Well, er, let’s go see how he’s getting along with David and Stella.” She dragged the Doctor away in the direction of the other room. “You are so bloody weird. Though that was a nice speech. You’re pretty good at those.”

“Oh, thank you, Pond. I am sort of proud of this body’s oratorical skills,” he said.

The atmosphere in the dining room was as tense as any interplanetary negotiations the Doctor had seen. Darren was holding his son by both wrists and stopping the nine-year-old from kicking the chairs or wandering away. On the other side of the room, Janet was quietly and reasonably convincing the two siblings to relax and get along with Jordan. When the Doctor and Amy entered the room, the six-year-old girl darted away from Janet’s grasp and ran up to the Doctor.

“We’re bored because Mrs. Williams doesn’t have any toys,” she said without introduction. “What should we do? Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

He kneeled down to talk to her. “I’m John Smith, a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Williams. And yes, it’s terribly sad that you don’t have any toys. Are you Stella?” She nodded. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Stella means ‘star’ in Latin.” He picked her up and spun her around. “You’re named after the stars.” Still holding the girl in his arms, he looked at Amy with a pleading expression.

This could end badly. The Doctor had the maturity and judgment of a five-year-old, and leaving a child in charge of the children wasn’t exactly a recipe for success. On the other hand, watching the children would free Janet and Darren to rejoin the rest of the guests. If he could apply his negotiating skills to babysitting, the Time Lord’s unexpected arrival might end up being a blessing. “Alright, I’ll leave you alone to play with the kids,” she said. “But if anything happens to them, I’ll turn you over to the Daleks.”

“Cross my hearts, nothing will happen.” He set the girl down and bent over to her level. “Now, what do you want to do?”

“John’s great with children,” Amy said to the other adults in the room. “Come on, let’s go back to the kitchen.”

 

***

 

Half an hour later, the Doctor was finishing braiding Stella’s hair. “I met this great archer while I was in the New Stone Age, and her hair was braided like this, except she had some porcupine quills woven in.”

“Wouldn’t they poke her?” David asked, running his fingers over the three little braids in his longish hair.

“Nah, she was careful. The arrows were another matter, though. Are you almost done, Jordan?” The Doctor was sitting on the ground in the lounge, and the older boy was perched above him on the couch, carefully folding the Doctor’s hair into a braid as the Time Lord tied off the end of Stella’s hair.

“Yeah, Mr. Smith. I’m done. Do you have another tie?” Jordan asked.

The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a ribbon. “Be careful with this one. It’s pretty old. Belonged to Marie Antoinette, the queen of France.”

“Cool,” Jordan said, fixing the ribbon into the Doctor’s hair.

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” the Doctor said. He and the three children sat in silence for a moment.

“Do you know when the party’s supposed to be over?” the Doctor asked at last.

“Mum said seven thirty,” Jordan said. “How much time do we have left, then?”

“Forty-eight minutes.”

“How did you know so fast?” David asked.

The Doctor grinned. “I just have a good sense of time.” He hopped to his feet and clapped his hands. “So, what do you want to do now? Checkers, hide-and-seek, hovercraft?”

“Can we do hovercraft?” Stella asked.

“Sure. Do you know where they keep them?”

“Er, I don’t think Mrs. Williams has any,” Stella guessed.

“We’ll just have to make a few, then. Follow me out to my… shed. I’d get the materials myself, but I’m supposed to be watching all of you.”

The adults were still congregated in the kitchen, so no one noticed the Doctor and the three children sneak out the back door. The neighbors could see only the top of the TARDIS through the kitchen window, but they could hear the clank of metal parts being thrown in a pile on the ground. The whir of the sonic screwdriver followed a few minutes later. At last, the buzzing of a newly made hovercraft filled the air.

When the laughter and excited squeals of the children drifted through the wall, Linda said, “They sound like they’re having so much fun. That John of yours is really good with kids, Amy.”

Amy stood on her tiptoes from her position near the table and tried to see out the window, but she only caught a glimpse of the Doctor’s head as he ran by. She laughed at the braids and the blue ribbon that was waving in the air. “Yeah. Sometimes I think he’s good with them because he’s a child himself.”

“How did you and Rory meet John?” Darren asked, and everyone turned their heads toward Rory as he answered with a bland lie. They missed the sight of Stella whizzing past the window in a small flying car.

When the time for the guests to leave began to approach, Frank excused himself to fetch his children from the backyard. The thump of the closing door covered up the sound of a crashing hovercraft, and Frank walked around the side of the house to see the Doctor with his arms submerged in a bush. “Come on out of there,” the Time Lord said, and he pulled Stella from the grip of the twigs. Her clothes were wrinkled and leaves were tangled in her hair.

“What’s going on?” Frank asked, smiling, as the Doctor held the girl in his arms and carried her over to her father. Jordan and David followed them, their bare feet sliding through the grass.

“We were just – “ David began, but the Doctor interrupted him.

“Playing hide-and-seek. The children wanted to ride a hovercraft, but I told them that it was unsafe and, more to the point, impossible in this century.” He winked at the kids, and they giggled.

“Well, you certainly sounded like you were having a good time earlier,” Frank said, “but I’m afraid the kids have to go. The party’s about ready to break up.”

The children protested, but Frank refused to give in, and soon they were being fitted with their shoes in the entryway.

“Thank you for the lunch, Amy,” Janet said. “It was magnificent.”

“And it was very nice to get to know you and Rory better. We should talk more often,” Frank said.

“Yes, and we hardly got to see your friend John at all. Will he be staying for very long?” Linda asked.

“Well, er, I don’t know,” the Doctor said.

Linda continued cheerfully, “We’ve certainly got to have a chance to chat before you go. Janet and I don’t meet too many new people since we spend too much time at home and in the garden. What would you say to a neighborhood picnic this Saturday? The weather’s supposed to be nice, and the kids always love a chance to go to the park.”

“That would be perfect,” Janet enthused. “You’ll all come, won’t you?”

Frank, Julia, and Rory assented. Darren nodded grudgingly, and after some persuading, Carol agreed to join the picnic.

“You’ll be there, too, won’t you, Mr. Smith?” Stella asked pleadingly.

The Doctor tried to bring himself to disagree, but then relented. “Oh, alright. If you want me to come, I will.” He leaned down and whispered to her, “But no hovercrafts, you understand? That has to be a secret.”

“I promise,” she said, and the Doctor patted her on the head.

“We’ll see you all on Saturday!” Linda called as she and Janet walked away at last.

When the other neighbors had departed, the Doctor turned to the Ponds, scowling. “You see what you roped me into? I came over for a brief chat and maybe an interstellar journey, and now I have to spend a Saturday eating little sandwiches and making polite conversation.”

“Hey, it’s your own fault. I certainly didn’t ask for a weird alien to show up in the middle of our attempt to make the neighbors think that we’re not lunatics with a blue door and an Ood as a housemaid,” Amy said.

“Well argued, Pond,” the Doctor said. “Well, at least there might be biscuits at the picnic. Oh, I almost forgot about the jammy dodgers! We can make them now.” He turned and rushed back into the house, leaving Amy and Rory still standing on the doorstep.

“Well, at least even the Doctor can’t mess up a picnic,” said Rory.

“You never know,” Amy said, grabbing Rory’s collar and pulling him in for a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This chapter is sort of a prologue that introduces the Ponds' neighbors. The real story will start in the next chapter. And if you want it, here's a summary of the neighbors:
> 
> Frank: father of Stella and David  
> Julia and Darren: parents of Jordan  
> Linda and Janet: sisters  
> Carol


End file.
